How to lie to yourself better (Part 2)
Jul 1, 2024
Case Study
Successful Self-Liars:
This is part two in an article series on the art of lying to yourself. I'd recommend reading the intro article here. In the future I’ll do more specific, less well-known case studies, but for this one it felt safest to go with people who couldn’t possibly be offended about me calling them a little delusional. & honestly I’d love to pick a fight with the one that might.
Steve Jobs
Who he was:
Founder & CEO, ex-CEO, and CEO of Apple, proliferator of turtleneck sweaters and glass staircases
How he lied to himself:
Steve Jobs was a master of story-crafting and recontextualizing over a long career with numerous ups and downs. Steve Jobs was not a fantastic engineer. He was a college dropout before it was cool; when he dropped out, it was not because he was at the cusp of greatness and could no longer keep up with coursework. He just wasn’t feeling it. But he identified what he felt was missing in the computing world — user-centric, sleek design. If you object by pointing out that this is / was not a lie, consider the level of certainty possible at the time, not only in the demand for such a solution, but also the ability of a small team to compete against the established computing giants like IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and later, Microsoft. He convinced Steve Wozniak, one of the most talented engineers of his generation, to leave a stable job at HP to work out of his garage. And Steve Jobs was not born from wealth; this wasn’t a case of a “small loan of a million dollars” — he sold his car to help provide their initial capital.
Years later, when Steve Jobs was sidelined at Apple by then-CEO John Sculley and left, Jobs sold all of his Apple stock except for a single share, and founded another seemingly-impossible venture, emboldened by his previous success. Apple, until then his life’s work, became an afterthought as he dedicated himself completely, first into NeXT and then Pixar, both of which he grew to multi-million dollar companies and industry disruptors. Then he returned to Apple, the company that sidelined him, and forgot about that story — taking a salary of $1, Steve Jobs was now creating a mythos that had never been true: that he, and he alone, was Apple’s heartbeat & savior.
How it helped him:
I mean, it’s Apple. He truly revolutionized our relationship with technology, and perhaps more broadly, influenced how everything — from software, to services, to food and retail — is branded, marketed, and sold. His overwhelming belief in his product vision led to unwavering drive along with a demand for perfection in Apple’s output. This excellence became key in Apple’s brand.
It also allowed him to achieve greater heights between his two stints at Apple than most can hope to achieve in their entire career. It is unimaginable to take your scrappy company to exponential sales growth, poach the CEO of Coca-Cola to take over as CEO, only to be sidelined and pushed out. Steve Jobs did not know how to ruminate, he only knew how to innovate. So he found his next passion, and kept trucking. Have you seen Monster’s Inc.? I think the work speaks for itself.
How it hurt him:
Steve Jobs was, in many ways, an asshole. Delusions (or perhaps, certainty) of grandeur can be used to justify any number of transgressions, from “get[ting] his girlfriend pregnant, and then den[ying] that the child is his [to] … park[ing] in handicapped spaces … [to] … cr[ying] like a small child when he does not get his way. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times”.. Insistence in having things done your way and only your way can come at a cost. These tendencies likely contributed to his initial ousting at Apple: a rational third party might look at an executive having temper tantrums in the office and think “maybe he isn’t worth the trouble”
More severely, Steve Jobs allowed his insistence on having things done his way through to his medical decisions, resulting in his untimely death. Steve Jobs had neuroendocrine cancer, a slow-moving and treatable form of pancreatic cancer. He opted instead for natural treatments & diet changes. In the words of his biographer, “I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking. And it had worked for him in the past.” Idealizations had taken Steve Jobs this far, so why stop now?
Bernie Sanders
Who he is:
Brooklyn-born, Vermont-based mittens-model, cousin of Statler & Waldorf
How he lied to himself:
Bernie Sanders has likely been the most ideologically consistent & honest national representative in the United States, but a democratic-socialist in the post-Red Scare US better be good at lying to himself. A politician needs to believe their message has a chance, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Otherwise, no one would go out and knock on doors or respond to emails with subject lines like “I CAN’T DO THIS WITHOUT YOU” or “WE NEED EVEN MORE MONEY FROM YOU OR THEY’RE GOING TO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHTS”.
Bernie Sanders established his ethos through community activism during his years at University of Chicago; when he moved to Burlington, Vermont years later & ran ill-fated campaigns for governor and then Senator under the Liberty Union Party, a fledgling socialist & workers’ rights party. He received under 6% of the vote in these elections — what was his takeaway? That his vote share in Burlington doubled his state-wide vote share. To a whopping 12%. Where others would see disappointment, Bernie Sanders saw opportunity. He ran for mayor of Burlington in 1980 & won by 10 votes, less than a tenth of a percentage point.
Fast forward to 2006, and after decades of serving as a beloved Burlington mayor, Bernie Sanders is elected to the Senate. One could point out his commitment to his ideological consistency & a more democratic-socialist United States was not only better for our future, but preferred by some “silent majority”. Sanders frequently points to public opinion polls showing that Americans want the ultra wealthy to pay higher taxes, and for the expansion of social programs as proof public sentiment is on his side, while dismissing public opinion polls that show, for example, as many of 2/3rds of Americans currently support mass deportations. He took on Hillary Clinton in 2016, even after she had amassed support from almost every Democratic elected official and never dipped below 50% of the vote share in nation-wide primary polls. In spite of having a quarter the name recognition of Hillary Clinton nationally, in spite of being registered as an Independent, and in spite of being older than any President in history, Sanders threw his hat in the ring. He didn’t have a shot in hell, but he did it anyway. And kept fighting even when it was mathematically impossible for him to get the nomination.
How it helped him:
Today, America’s a significantly more progressive country thanks to Bernie Sanders’ leadership & delusional vision that the public could be moved towards supporting greater government interventions, social safety nets, and workers’ rights. This meant having rose-colored glasses through all the humiliating defeats and clear evidence that his message was not the winning one. After decades of pushing, he finally struck a chord, and activated one of the least politically engaged generations in recent American history. They didn’t get out of bed for rationality, they did it because he could convincingly sell this collective delusion: that this individualistic, conservative nation originally colonized by anti-hedonist and hyper-individualist religious extremists and reformers could become the largest social democracy in the world.
This tenacity was on display at the start of his career: rather than seeing his 10 vote initial victory as Mayor of Burlington as a tenuous coalition, Bernie Sanders saw the success of his insurgent candidacy as validation of a mandate for his agenda. This is an important demonstration of mental flexibility in successes & failures. When he lost his campaigns, it was not evidence of distaste for his policies. When he ran his campaigns, it was inevitable that he could win. But once he won, he had proven definitively that popular support was on his side. This allowed him to govern more effectively, from a place of strength rather than weakness and reconciliation.
How it hurt him:
Sanders has often had difficulty making in-roads with politicians on either side of the aisle due to his strong ideological positions. During his nearly 2-decade-long tenure in the Senate, he’s co-sponsored 3 bills that have become law. 2 of these bills renamed post offices. Suffice it to say, his impact on actual legislation has remained low due to his belief that the day will come when the American public is strongly and unabashedly on his side.
Elon Musk
Who he is:
Non-Founder & CEO of Tesla, Eskimo sibling of Chelsea Manning
How he lied to himself:
Elon Musk is fantastic at making stories & repackaging narratives to align with his goals, and seems to really believe in his ability to achieve. Once he came on at Tesla, he centered this story around electric cars being the future & Tesla being the only company who could do it, and, of course, only with him at the helm. As its share price inflated, so did his ego. He became convinced that the “mainstream” social media companies were suppressing “the truth” and his hilarious Twitter memes. So he bought Twitter for more than the annual GDP of Iceland. And he’s continued to insist that racism, anti semitism, and harassment on the platform has fallen while engagement has risen, despite industry valuations continuing to devalue Twitter. The name change didn’t help.
How it helped him:
Elon Musk has achieved pretty remarkable things. Tesla undoubtedly increased excitement for electric cars, and took a major bite out of major problems plaguing the EV market: low scale, low access to chargers, and little political will behind expanding access. These are all problems that more rational, less deluded individuals would not feel comfortable taking on. You need some delusions to take the moonshots. Full self-driving vehicles seemed like a fantasy when Musk first promised they were a year away. Nearly a decade later, and Tesla has self-driving live for millions of vehicles, and has helped clear the way for superior self-driving products, like Waymo, to make it on the road.
How it hurt him
Elon’s inability to be realistic & apparent belief the rules should not apply to him has caused both himself and Tesla numerous problems —-from promising that full-self-driving cars will be road-ready “in just one year” for 9 years in a row (see: Idealization #4), to maintenance issues, to self-driving bugs requiring recalls for nearly every Tesla sold since 2012, to being charged with securities fraud for pumping the Tesla stock price with a “joke tweet”. Elon’s own actions have also tanked Tesla’s public favorability, leading to sales slow downs. Tesla was a status and virtue signal: when the CEO is in bed with racists and voting for Trump, its appeal as a status symbol is lost.
Self-aware people do not get so high on their own supply. Elon Musk has repeatedly shown through his tweets that he is sympathetic towards racists, especially when statistics are lied about or misinterpreted to support that racism. He’s estranged from most of his children. He’s alienated all but his major sycophants
Take, for example, his changing of Twitter to “X”. X.com was Elon’s first start-up in the 1990s, created to be an “everything store”. It was eventually purchased by Paypal, providing him his first successful company exit. But his insistence that his branding, his idea is the “right” one led him to do away with one of the most valuable brands in the world at the time.
